Brian Jones has asked us to
pause during the 2011 MLK Day to consider King's
reaction to the achievement gap that persists well into the twenty-first century, suggesting that education policy begun under George W. Bush--No
Child Left Behind (NCLB)--and accelerated under Barack Obama works against
King's dream.

As Jones mentions, political
leaders are apt to quote King selectively, focusing on King's words that serve
their political and ideological purposes--Republican and Democrats alike.
I agree with Jones, and suggest we spend more time and energy on the challenges
from King in 1967 that Jones recommends.

"Education is still the
key to eliminating gender inequities, to reducing poverty, to creating a
sustainable planet, and to fostering peace. And in a knowledge economy,
education is the new currency by which nations maintain economic
competitiveness and global prosperity."

How would King respond to
this Utopian expectation coming from the same educational leader who regularly
characterizes our public schools and their teachers as failures?

"I am now convinced
that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective--the
solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed
measure: the guaranteed income. . . . We are likely to
find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the
elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first
abolished."

The original charter school
movement focused on relieving public schools of bureaucratic mandates, creating
real-world laboratories for experimentation in order to benefit all public
schools. But the charter school movement endorsed and perpetuated by Obama and
the new reformers is a corporate model, characterized by Knowledge
Is Power Program (KIPP) and Geoffrey
Canada's Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ).

While much of the charter
school debate has focused on "no
excuses" ideology and student
achievement, often absent in the public discourse is the impact of charter
schools and all aspects of school choice on student populations (race, income,
special needs, ELL) and most importantly on segregation.

In my own work examining
school choice, I identified some basic patterns among school choice options.
One important fact of choice is that while choice is rarely taken when offered,
parents tend to choose for non-academic reasons, creating stratification and thus working against one of the central
tenants of King's civil rights agenda--desegregation.

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And while we can only
speculate about King's response to the corporate charter school movement, we
now have some valuable evidence of his reaction. A study by Frankenberg,
Siegel-Hawley, and Wang from the Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA), "Choice without Equity:
Charter School Segregation," presents a sobering picture of the
segregating impact that charter movement is having on children (from the
abstract):

"Our findings suggest
that charters currently isolate students by race and class. This analysis
of recent data finds that charter schools are more racially isolated than
traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area
in the nation. In some regions, white students are over-represented in
charter schools while in other charter schools,
minority students have little exposure to white students. Data about the
extent to which charter schools serve low-income and English learner students
is incomplete, but suggest that a substantial share of charter schools may not
enroll such students. As charters represent an increasing share of our public
schools, they influence the level of segregation experienced by all of our
nation's school children.

While promising Utopian
results from public education is also promising failure, we can begin to state
with a good deal of certainty that the new reformers' endorsement of corporate
charter schools is inverting King's dream of racial and economic harmony.

An Associate Professor of Education at Furman University since 2002, Dr. P. L. Thomas taught high school English for 18 years at Woodruff High along with teaching as an adjunct at a number of Upstate colleges. He holds an undergraduate degree in (more...)